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Notes on Epistemic Closure

November 30, 2012 7:30 pmNovember 30, 2012 7:30 pm

I gather that philosophers are upset over the use of the term “epistemic closure” to refer to the closing of the movement conservative mind – that’s not what they mean by the term. Never
mind: that’s the term everyone is using. And recent reports are a reminder of just how closed that mind really is.

Start with Bruce Bartlett, who mentions in his mea culpa that when he asked conservative colleagues what they thought
about some politically incorrect remarks quoted in the New York Times, it turned out that they were completely unaware of the whole thing – they didn’t read the Times, not even to find out what their
enemies were saying.

Maybe this attitude explains, in part, the amazing debacle of Romney polling. We now know that Romney’s internal polls were wildly wrong, and that, incredibly, he went into Election Day confident of victory. My immediate question is not so much why those polls were wrong, but rather why the campaign didn’t have severe doubts
about what its pollsters were telling them.

I mean, anyone who clicked on Nate Silver got a very different view of the race, with the vast majority of public polls portraying an Obama edge. Why wasn’t Romney, or someone else at the top level, asking hard
questions about why the internal polls were so different, and why the pollsters believed they knew so much better, not just than the public polls, but than the obviously confident Obama team? Maybe the answer is
that nobody on that side even considered clicking on a Times blog! Bear in mind that Romney got in big trouble in one of the debates because he apparently got his Benghazi story from Fox News, with no awareness
that Fox’s version wasn’t, you know, true.

All this in turn ties in, I think, with a phenomenon I notice a lot on the right (you can see it often in the comments on this blog): the persistent portrayal of people who disagree with them as marginal figures with
trivial support. I think of Bill O’Reilly dismissing anyone who presents data he doesn’t like as “far left”, even when they’re thoroughly mainstream. Or, to be self-centered, the
constant insistence by some people that nobody pays attention to what yours truly says; there are, it appears, an awful lot of nobodies out there. I’m
not sure I fully understand this phenomenon, but it comes in part from a refusal to pay any attention at all to what other people think.

The point isn’t just that right-wingers believe in their own reality, but that they don’t think it matters that other people have different versions of reality. And no, this isn’t symmetric: liberals
don’t consider it unnecessary to know what conservatives are thinking, or dismiss actually influential figures as marginal. Liberal may despise Rush Limbaugh, but they won’t dismiss him as a marginal
figure nobody listens to.

In some ways, the right’s epistemic closure has been a source of strength; right-wingers certainly don’t negotiate with themselves. But reality does have a way of making itself known, eventually, and the
right really doesn’t know what to do when that happens.